What Is a Unicorn Company? (And What Comes After)

A unicorn company is a privately held startup valued at $1 billion or more. The term was coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee in a November 2013 TechCrunch article titled "Welcome To The Unicorn Club." At the time only 39 such companies existed in the United States, which is what made the mythical creature the right metaphor. The taxonomy has since expanded using metric prefixes: decacorn ($10B), hectocorn ($100B), and most recently kilocorn ($1T).

The complete taxonomy

Tier	Value	Scale
Unicorn	$1 billion	10⁹
Decacorn	$10 billion	10¹⁰
Hectocorn	$100 billion	10¹¹
Kilocorn	$1 trillion	10¹²

Each tier uses a metric prefix: deca means ten, hecto means one hundred, kilo means one thousand. A kilocorn is therefore worth a thousand unicorns.

The origin of the term

Aileen Lee, founder of Cowboy Ventures, found in 2013 that only about 0.07 percent of venture-backed software startups had reached a billion dollars. That rarity, roughly one in fifteen hundred, made the unicorn the right image. Within months the word had moved from venture circles into mainstream business press, and it now appears in Merriam-Webster.

What comes after kilocorn?

The next metric prefix is mega, one million, so a megacorn would be worth $1 quadrillion. Global GDP is around $105 trillion, so no single entity reaching that figure is conceivable on any current trajectory. Thirteen kilocorns exist as of May 2026, all but one of them public. See the full list of most valuable companies.